Experimental investigation of hydrogen uptakes on functional porous adsorbents

• Main Author: Low, Hong Jin
• Other Authors: Anutosh Chakraborty
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Engineering; Functional porous adsorbents; Adsorption; Hydrogen uptake
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/177034
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Global warming has been a global concern in recent years and is largely attributed to the huge amount of greenhouse gases produced and released into the atmosphere. Human activities, especially transportation, is largely responsible for the greenhouse effect. Under immense pressure from global leaders, the transportation industry has since began to work on developing vehicles that run on cleaner and greener energy for sustainability. Currently, efforts are focused on making efficient electric vehicles but the problem is not mitigated because the energy in the batteries of these vehicles come from power plant which produce energy by burning fossil fuel. The spotlight is on renewable energy such as using hydrogen gas as energy carrier due to its environmentally friendly energy conversion. Currently, hydrogen gas is stored at very high pressure or low temperature to improve the energy density per volume. This makes existing hydrogen storage expensive and inefficient. In this report, hydrogen adsorption on porous functional materials such as Maxsorb-III and metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) like HKUST-1 and UiO-66 under various pressure and temperature conditions through volumetric analysis. The efficiency of hydrogen uptake will be evaluated, together with its isotherms. Characterizations of the adsorbents will be evaluated via scanning electron microscope (SEM) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) graph results. Experimental results are in favor of hydrogen storage at low temperature and high pressure conditions, which is where the highest hydrogen uptake is found. Maxsorb-III demonstrated promising hydrogen storage capability for the near future and further analysis is required to identify the most suitable MOF for hydrogen storage.